


it's a hollywood summer

by cherry_darling



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-18
Updated: 2012-04-18
Packaged: 2017-11-03 20:59:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherry_darling/pseuds/cherry_darling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fleur inhales deeply through her nose, draws in the scent of the ocean and the rain and the sand and this new life. She imagines the sea in her lungs, and the almost perpetually overcast sky, and it’s a wonderful, terrifying thought that a place could live inside her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's a hollywood summer

and all that i've got and all that i need  
i tie in a knot and i lay at your feet  
(JOANNA NEWSOM)  
  
  
  
  
It rains often at Shell Cottage, the drops pounding against the windows and Fleur sometimes thinks absently that if the wind blows hard enough that it will take the entire house with it.

  
It won’t, of course, she’s not stupid and besides, there are enough spells protecting it but she sometimes wonders.  
Sometimes, she likes to bundle up in multiple sweaters and scarves and her favorite pair of gloves and go outside and stand on the beach, just to feel the surf lap at her feet and the rain fall on her head.

Fleur inhales deeply through her nose, draws in the scent of the ocean and the rain and the sand and this new life. She imagines the sea in her lungs, and the almost perpetually overcast sky, and it’s a wonderful, terrifying thought that a place could live inside her.

She has never felt more at home.  
  
  
  
  
Growing up is a funny thing, Fleur thinks, as she looks at her face in the mirror. She is too young for wrinkles or fine lines but she knows that she won’t be young forever and she’s not sure how she feels about that. She feels very old but she is still so young.

She remembers summers from her youth – coming home from school with wide eyes and tales of adventures with Juliette and Roxanne and Astrid, and walking in the yard, hand in hand with Gabrielle, and she was young, so young and so greedy, stealing every moment that came to her and relishing in them. She never thought about the future, about the summer after that or the summer after that.

She’d had a wonderful time, then, and braided lilies into Gabrielle’s hair.  
  
  
  
  
The second summer with Bill is another greedy summer (all of her summers are greedy ones and she doesn’t know what she’ll do when her summers run out; she doesn't think they ever will), and one that Fleur guards close to her breast. They had a fire in the fireplace every night and run over the dunes during the day. She remembers laughing so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks and kicking up sand as they ran, clouds forming behind her. There was sand between her toes, coating the soles of her feet and Bill had kissed her hands and her cheeks and temples and eyelids and finally her lips and he’d said, “You’re beautiful” and she knows it really meant  _I love you_.

They’d played a game to see who could stand in the water the longest, wading out to mid thigh and just standing there, braced against the tide and the cold. It was a battle of the wills that Fleur always won and she said, “Don’t just  _let_  me win. You must put up a fight or else you’re doing me a disservice” so Bill had put up a fight and he fought well but Fleur won anyway.

She’d just laughed as he half-ran, half-stumbled out of the water and said, “I am not a veela, actually. I have been lying to you this entire time. I am part mermaid” and Bill just asked, “So will our children have tails?” and Fleur had never thought about children until then. She's not opposed to the idea. In fact, she rather likes it.

“I am not sure about tails,” she admitted as she walked back to him. He was sprawled out on the beach then, his jeans rolled up around his calves but they were soaked to the waist anyway and the bare skin of his legs was covered in sand.

Fleur sat down next to him, half soaked and chilled to the bone but Bill nudged her foot with his and she warmed.  
  
  
  
  
Sometimes, the sun comes out and on those days, Fleur wakes early and goes down to the beach and collects seashells. She shines and polishes them and it gives her a strange satisfaction to do so.

She keeps them in a box under her bed and she handles the box very carefully, lest they break. Sometimes, though, the thin ones shatter anyway, but the edges are never sharp enough to cut her, so she just scoops them out and puts them back on the beach.

Soon, she will be able to identify when and where she’d found a particular shell and she starts to think of them as memories in physical form.

 _I found this one in July two years ago,_  she thinks, touching a grey one with just the tips of her fingers.  _It was around Harry’s birthday, I remember. We had a bonfire on the beach and Hermione and I were going back to the house because we got too cold and I stepped on it and it was shining in the light._

She remembers putting it in the pocket of her cardigan and fingering the edges for the rest of the night.  
  
  
  
  
She used to be able to compress her memories like the pages of a book but now there are too many and they get all jumbled, like half-finished drafts that she’s haphazardly thrown together and she can’t pinpoint some exact moments except with her shells but sometimes she will second-guess herself on them, too. There are so many memories that she can’t place, so many days spent on the beach, so many fires and so many races with Bill and they all blur together in a lovely way.

Her hair is changing color, too, turning more gold than silver, the way veela hair sometimes does when they age.

There still aren’t lines on her face and she’s still slender and beautiful but she still wonders.

Fleur has never been scared of growing old but she never pictured it happening to her.

Once, Gabrielle had confessed her fear of aging and Fleur had scoffed. “We will be beautiful until we die,” she’d said, stroking her sister’s cheek fondly, and she meant  _it's nothing to be scared of_. “Don’t worry.”

She imagines she will have a lot of laugh lines when she grows up.

She will embrace them, she decides, and smiles to herself.  
  
  
  
  
The third summer is also a greedy one, but the weather is nicer so they spend more time outside.

Bill has thick, strong wrists and Fleur has very long fingers but even she isn’t able to wrap her entire hand around his forearm and she laughs and tries to drag him down to the beach with her. He protests, claims “I have to work” but Fleur just laughs again, the sound reverberating around their small house and she says, “We have time for work later. But we must live  _now_ ” and he let her shove him out the front door.

The sun is shining, glinting off the water, dappled gold and beautiful and Fleur throws her arms out as if to embrace the world. “Look,” she says. “This is better than work, no? Look at how beautiful it all is” and they hold hands as they run down to the beach. They don’t race this time, they just keep in step with each other and they strip down to their underwear before throwing themselves into the water.

It’s summer but the water is still icy so they cling to each other after a few moments of just standing there, and soon Fleur’s arms are around his neck and her legs wrap around his waist and Bill’s arms are so big and secure around her and she rests her cheek against his shoulder. She smiles against his neck and she can feel his smile against her hair.

She closes her eyes and embraces Bill the same way she embraces life.  
  
  
  
  
That night, after Bill is tucked up in bed and sound asleep, Fleur pulls on her sweater and steps outside. The nights are always bitterly cold and her feet are bare and chilled against the wooden floorboards and she opens the front door, steps outside. She wraps her sweater around her tightly.

The sky is that inky blue-black color and the stars are out. She tries to remember the constellations from school but she can’t so she makes up her own instead, creating her own myths behind them and decides she likes her versions better and decides to keep them. She will tell Bill in the morning over tea and buttered croissants. She thinks that would make him smile.

She laughs a little and the wind kicks up, a gentle breeze whipping through her hair and Fleur throws out her arms again and breathes deeply, her lungs expanding under her ribs and her heart is full to bursting as she tries to take everything in.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 _end._


End file.
